To "help" people with securing their network, the french government issued a 200+ pages specification for a software that would secure your computer and prevent it from being used to downlaod illegal content.
It took them 200 pages to tell people to unplug their computers?
Seriously, they have to know that saying you've got "unbreakable" security just invites everyone from script kiddies up to PhD researchers to break your program in every possible way. And it will get broken. Within a week (probably within a day). The more complicated a program is, the more likely it is to get broken.
Oh, I get it, they don't care if it works or not, they just want to point to something they can say is "secure" so that it's obviously your fault, and your fault alone, if anything "bad" emanates to or from your computer.
And you do not have to buy the content from them. You will not die without it. You are just not free to take it.
That would be a fair comment if the producers of content in the last hundred years hadn't raided the public domain (and ignored intellectual property when it was inconvenient for them) for all of their ideas, then immediately turned around and prevented any of their work from going into the public domain. If they bribe the government into giving them an unlimited copyright, I see no reason to respect their ill gotten gains.
I don't care if he's from the left or right of the political spectrum, just elect someone who is smart and has a track record for fairness and following through on his/her campaign promises.
They both suck. Republicans say they'll do a bunch of shit (very little of it good) and then actually do it. The Democrats say they'll do a bunch of decent things, then even if they've got a majority they'll squabble amongst themselves and get nothing done. Also, Lieberman is a Democrat in name only. So even if Democrats supposedly have a supermajority, they don't actually get everyone to form ranks and exercise it. Add in Republicans who block everything and keep shouting "death panels", "tax hike", and "cut and run" and you've got a political shitstorm. The president doesn't have the kind of power that people think he has or that the Unitary Executive folks seem to want presidents (at least, "their" presidents) to have. He can't control tax rates, he can't jedi mind trick the economy into recovering, he can't force Congress to do much of anything.
The only things on your list that he has power over are:
Gitmo (Very, very little excuse for this not being shut down. Move the criminals into prisons up here).
Combat troops in Iraq (Sure, we've "ceased combat operations", but these are still soldiers who are getting attacked and receiving combat pay).
NSA still doing "illegal" wiretaps (He may have some control over this, but the intelligence community is a Byzantine mess, and even if he issued an order stopping it, there's so much red tape, bureaucracy, and misdirection that there's no way to actually ensure that it gets followed.)
Congress quitting 3 weeks early he could theoretically stop, but they're basically just waiting for the election to be over and won't do anything anyway (yeah, it's stupid, but this whole session was stupid, there's the party of "No" and the party of "No balls").
The other things Obama has basically no control over whatsoever. Blame the legislative branch. Yes, the president can veto bad laws, but it would have been political suicide to veto what few things the Republicans didn't filibuster. The only thing he could've (and should've) done is use the bully pulpit to get the message out more and really get people to urge Congress to at least vote on shit. Of course, given the 24 hour news networks and how they're biased (towards retarded people of various political stripes), it's not like that would've done much good. You'd have Fox News in the morning going "Is the president really acting presidential by talking so much?", then you'd have midday news saying "Some are saying the president isn't acting like a good leader", then you'd have the nighttime talking heads calling the president a tyrant for having the gall to talk about the legislative process (except for Glenn Beck who was too busy crying and drawing on his chalkboard). The next day Keith Olberman calls them all the worst people in the world, instead of calling out African warlords who use rape as a weapon, or corporations who use child labor in factories resembling ones that have been outlaws in western nations for almost a century. Nothing gets done, everyone feels a little shittier, and we all move on because we've got work in the morning.
When a true thinking machine is created, it will be chemical, not electronic; thought is nothing more than a complex chemical reaction.
Is the complex chemical reaction reducible to the complexity of a Turing Machine? If so, computers can (in theory) think.
That said, AI as a field has these two problems: When it does something right, it's no longer considered to require "intelligence" (see Chess) When it does something wrong, it repeats that wrong thing with every new generation thinking they've done something special.
It's the "20 years away" phenomenon, like fusion power, space trips to Mars, or cloning. Intelligent people with stars in their eyes think that they'll be the one to crack the code that's stumped luminaries for generations even though we're probably nowhere near the level of basic research to even know everything we don't know about these problems. We're trying to make intelligent machines from scratch despite not being able to reliably reverse engineer the only example of "intelligence" (give or take your own personal bar that intelligence should meet) that we know of. It's like cavemen trying to produce an atom bomb with sticks and stones.
Really what the printing press did was break the back of the church. No longer were Bibles created through laborious process and restricted to a few wealthy hands (many of whom probably couldn't read it themselves anyway). With the ability to mass produce books, there was the ability for the average person (or at least the middle class) to read the Bible themselves and form their own opinions. It didn't make people question the nobility, it made them question the clergy.
Again, rich people in the good old days never paid 90+%. There were a ton of loopholes around that.
No, but the Reagan tax cuts did remove a lot of the loopholes. And the tax rates were higher than anything currently on the table. And the loopholes have since been put back in, so you have even less to bitch about.
As to your sympathy. fuck you. Your sympathy wouldn't be worth 4% of my income, much less 4% of a rich person's income.
Unless you're making over $250,000 (and I doubt that anyone who does gives a shit about talking to random people on slashdot), you aren't getting a 4% increase. And I repeat my point: rich people can go fuck themselves if they think it's some incredible burden to lose a couple percent of their income.
Given the death spiral that public education currently is in, I'd say, yes, I shouldn't be forced to waste my money on harming kids. If I'm going to pay for education, it's going to be real education, not teacher unions, not top heavy bureaucracies, and not nihilistic ideologies in the classroom.
The public education system is in a death spiral because we've given it a bunch of unfunded mandates, mandates that take money away from schools that are already in trouble (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer), we base the funding on what the property values of the surrounding community are (oh, poor places don't have a tax base, so their schools are shitty, who'd have guessed that would happen?), and we leave curriculum decisions to a bunch of elderly folks and rednecks who wouldn't know science if it slapped them in the face and called them stupid. If you live in a decently well off area, you can get a pretty good education in school. I took AP classes, got college credit, and while I didn't enjoy every aspect of my high school, it provided a decent enough education for what it was, and I think that if people couldn't get that kind of education for free, we'd be a hell of a lot worse off.
Why is it government's job to "take care" of the elderly population (especially when the vast majority of the elderly population can take care of itself, perhaps with some help from children and relatives)? Or school kids? Wake me when government comes up with serious programs that help the elderly or children.
Why is it the government's job to "take care" of fires, or crime, or roads, or military, or natural disasters, or national parks, etc, etc.
Because we, the people, should be constantly trying to form a more perfect union. And I don't think any place could be considered even decent that writes off the poor, the elderly, and the disabled as being not worth taking care of to some minimum level of living. I don't think it's justifiable that the wealthy get to say "I've got mine, everyone else can fuck off." I don't think everything is wonderful when trust fund babies bitch about people taking their "hard earned money", while 10% of the country is unemployed and trying to make ends meet.
Most of all, it's incredibly short sighted. Having a bunch of poor angry people leads to higher crime, increased homelessness, riots, etc. You get enough of a base of poor and angry people and you get revolt and revolution (see almost every revolution and resistance movement in history).
What's that Lassie? You saying we should drop the cutoffs for Social Security even lower, Lassie? Maybe even get rid of Social Security altogether, Lassie?
No, I'm saying your point about rich people being able to take care of themselves and giving the finger to everyone else is fucking retarded, you arrogant prick. If you want to go live in a libertarian paradise, move to fucking Somalia. They won't bug you for Social Security taxes there. They won't make you pay for schools. The government won't do shit to you. You'll also be living in a hell hole in constant fear of the poor people around you who may or may not be desperate enough to stab you for the clothes on your back and the cash in your wallet. Have a good fucking time.
or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just
Given that the RIAA's favorite tactic was joining together hundreds of "Jon Does" into one case, couldn't an argument be made that those defendants are jointly liable, therefore each individually is only on the hook for a couple bucks?
Consider this: lawyers spend years in college learning laws, then spend 8 hours a day (at least) immersed in the law. In the course of their life they'll spend probably half a million hours working with the law. Yet even they don't know enough about all areas of law to act as effective counsel for anything beyond their area of expertise (and usually it's even more limited to being the area of their expertise within their own state).
Understanding every facet of the law would be like being fluent in every programming language in existence from obscure assembly languages to pure brainfuck to every joke programming language. Except that US law is worse in that it's based on 250 some odd years of written law in the US, plus bases itself off "common law" which goes back hundreds of years back to England at least as far back as the Magna Carta, and could even be said to make some allusions to the Greek Democracy and Roman Republic of thousands of years ago. Oh, and the revision control is worse than CVS.
10 times what it would've cost to buy is a deterrent. 200 times what it would've cost to buy is absurd. 750 times what it cost to buy is Orwellian. 150000 times what it would've cost to buy is Lovecraftian.
You don't stay rich, if you ignore things that cause you to lose money. 4% is a lot of your income to permanently lose, especially, if government keeps increasing that.
I have so very little sympathy. A 39% tax rate on the top bracket is incredibly low. Even under Ronald Reagan the top tax rate was 50%, and all the conservatives love trotting that out as a time of great growth. Nevermind that in the 1950s, quite possibly one of the biggest economic booms in American history, the top tax rates were over 90%. There might not have been as many super rich, heck, there might not even have been as many "rich". But the average person wasn't financing everything they owned with endless debt, and the middle class was as strong as it's ever been.
Also, if Social Security is "retirement insurance" (which is the only relatively serious rationalization for Social Security), then it makes sense that rich people shouldn't have to pay it.
If you don't have kids, should you not have to pay for education? Or are there many hard to measure effects of a reasonable educated population? The taxes you pay don't necessarily have to come back to you as some form of direct personal benefit. Are we better or worse off having our elderly population be reasonably taken care of?
They already have self-insurance (in the form of wealth) that beats anything the government could provide.
You can make a lot less than $106000 and still save plenty of money for retirement (well, assuming a stock market crash doesn't wipe everything out).
It's sort of like Poe's Law, except for technological illiteracy instead of religious fundamentalism. There are way too many managers who will read it and think it's the best idea ever, he should add sarcasm tags before this becomes industry "best practices".
I think it's clear where this is going. The state will end up generating less revenue than expected due to this non-compliance. It will then either have to raise the tax or extend the filing requirement to more people to identify the people who are not complying.
Couldn't they just ask the IRS to rat on those people who report income above the cutoff but don't file in the state?
That reminds me a lot of how the rich are bitching about having to pay another 4% on their income taxes, despite not having to pay Social Security taxes on income over $106,800 (6.2% from you, 6.2% from the person paying you). That means that anyone in the 25% or 28% tax bracket is actually paying a higher rate of taxes than the top level. Do people not realize this? I'd be more than willing to keep the top marginal rate on income at 35% if the cap is removed on Social Security taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Aww, that's so cute, thinking that either one will end in anything besides total ruin.
Steamboat Willie will still be copyrighted.
Some would say it takes a couple decades..
To "help" people with securing their network, the french government issued a 200+ pages specification for a software that would secure your computer and prevent it from being used to downlaod illegal content.
It took them 200 pages to tell people to unplug their computers?
Seriously, they have to know that saying you've got "unbreakable" security just invites everyone from script kiddies up to PhD researchers to break your program in every possible way. And it will get broken. Within a week (probably within a day). The more complicated a program is, the more likely it is to get broken.
Oh, I get it, they don't care if it works or not, they just want to point to something they can say is "secure" so that it's obviously your fault, and your fault alone, if anything "bad" emanates to or from your computer.
And you do not have to buy the content from them. You will not die without it. You are just not free to take it.
That would be a fair comment if the producers of content in the last hundred years hadn't raided the public domain (and ignored intellectual property when it was inconvenient for them) for all of their ideas, then immediately turned around and prevented any of their work from going into the public domain. If they bribe the government into giving them an unlimited copyright, I see no reason to respect their ill gotten gains.
The $5 wrench they buy to beat you over the head with till you agree to give them your password/build in a backdoor.
I don't care if he's from the left or right of the political spectrum, just elect someone who is smart and has a track record for fairness and following through on his/her campaign promises.
What do you do when that option doesn't exist?
WHO are the "decepticons" again?
They both suck. Republicans say they'll do a bunch of shit (very little of it good) and then actually do it. The Democrats say they'll do a bunch of decent things, then even if they've got a majority they'll squabble amongst themselves and get nothing done. Also, Lieberman is a Democrat in name only. So even if Democrats supposedly have a supermajority, they don't actually get everyone to form ranks and exercise it. Add in Republicans who block everything and keep shouting "death panels", "tax hike", and "cut and run" and you've got a political shitstorm. The president doesn't have the kind of power that people think he has or that the Unitary Executive folks seem to want presidents (at least, "their" presidents) to have. He can't control tax rates, he can't jedi mind trick the economy into recovering, he can't force Congress to do much of anything.
The only things on your list that he has power over are:
Gitmo (Very, very little excuse for this not being shut down. Move the criminals into prisons up here).
Combat troops in Iraq (Sure, we've "ceased combat operations", but these are still soldiers who are getting attacked and receiving combat pay).
NSA still doing "illegal" wiretaps (He may have some control over this, but the intelligence community is a Byzantine mess, and even if he issued an order stopping it, there's so much red tape, bureaucracy, and misdirection that there's no way to actually ensure that it gets followed.)
Congress quitting 3 weeks early he could theoretically stop, but they're basically just waiting for the election to be over and won't do anything anyway (yeah, it's stupid, but this whole session was stupid, there's the party of "No" and the party of "No balls").
The other things Obama has basically no control over whatsoever. Blame the legislative branch. Yes, the president can veto bad laws, but it would have been political suicide to veto what few things the Republicans didn't filibuster. The only thing he could've (and should've) done is use the bully pulpit to get the message out more and really get people to urge Congress to at least vote on shit. Of course, given the 24 hour news networks and how they're biased (towards retarded people of various political stripes), it's not like that would've done much good. You'd have Fox News in the morning going "Is the president really acting presidential by talking so much?", then you'd have midday news saying "Some are saying the president isn't acting like a good leader", then you'd have the nighttime talking heads calling the president a tyrant for having the gall to talk about the legislative process (except for Glenn Beck who was too busy crying and drawing on his chalkboard). The next day Keith Olberman calls them all the worst people in the world, instead of calling out African warlords who use rape as a weapon, or corporations who use child labor in factories resembling ones that have been outlaws in western nations for almost a century. Nothing gets done, everyone feels a little shittier, and we all move on because we've got work in the morning.
When a true thinking machine is created, it will be chemical, not electronic; thought is nothing more than a complex chemical reaction.
Is the complex chemical reaction reducible to the complexity of a Turing Machine? If so, computers can (in theory) think.
That said, AI as a field has these two problems: When it does something right, it's no longer considered to require "intelligence" (see Chess) When it does something wrong, it repeats that wrong thing with every new generation thinking they've done something special.
It's the "20 years away" phenomenon, like fusion power, space trips to Mars, or cloning. Intelligent people with stars in their eyes think that they'll be the one to crack the code that's stumped luminaries for generations even though we're probably nowhere near the level of basic research to even know everything we don't know about these problems. We're trying to make intelligent machines from scratch despite not being able to reliably reverse engineer the only example of "intelligence" (give or take your own personal bar that intelligence should meet) that we know of. It's like cavemen trying to produce an atom bomb with sticks and stones.
Really what the printing press did was break the back of the church. No longer were Bibles created through laborious process and restricted to a few wealthy hands (many of whom probably couldn't read it themselves anyway). With the ability to mass produce books, there was the ability for the average person (or at least the middle class) to read the Bible themselves and form their own opinions. It didn't make people question the nobility, it made them question the clergy.
"Regardless of the century, plane, or species, developing artificers never fail to invent the ornithopter."
Again, rich people in the good old days never paid 90+%. There were a ton of loopholes around that.
No, but the Reagan tax cuts did remove a lot of the loopholes. And the tax rates were higher than anything currently on the table. And the loopholes have since been put back in, so you have even less to bitch about.
As to your sympathy. fuck you. Your sympathy wouldn't be worth 4% of my income, much less 4% of a rich person's income.
Unless you're making over $250,000 (and I doubt that anyone who does gives a shit about talking to random people on slashdot), you aren't getting a 4% increase. And I repeat my point: rich people can go fuck themselves if they think it's some incredible burden to lose a couple percent of their income.
Given the death spiral that public education currently is in, I'd say, yes, I shouldn't be forced to waste my money on harming kids. If I'm going to pay for education, it's going to be real education, not teacher unions, not top heavy bureaucracies, and not nihilistic ideologies in the classroom.
The public education system is in a death spiral because we've given it a bunch of unfunded mandates, mandates that take money away from schools that are already in trouble (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer), we base the funding on what the property values of the surrounding community are (oh, poor places don't have a tax base, so their schools are shitty, who'd have guessed that would happen?), and we leave curriculum decisions to a bunch of elderly folks and rednecks who wouldn't know science if it slapped them in the face and called them stupid. If you live in a decently well off area, you can get a pretty good education in school. I took AP classes, got college credit, and while I didn't enjoy every aspect of my high school, it provided a decent enough education for what it was, and I think that if people couldn't get that kind of education for free, we'd be a hell of a lot worse off.
Why is it government's job to "take care" of the elderly population (especially when the vast majority of the elderly population can take care of itself, perhaps with some help from children and relatives)? Or school kids? Wake me when government comes up with serious programs that help the elderly or children.
Why is it the government's job to "take care" of fires, or crime, or roads, or military, or natural disasters, or national parks, etc, etc.
Because we, the people, should be constantly trying to form a more perfect union. And I don't think any place could be considered even decent that writes off the poor, the elderly, and the disabled as being not worth taking care of to some minimum level of living. I don't think it's justifiable that the wealthy get to say "I've got mine, everyone else can fuck off." I don't think everything is wonderful when trust fund babies bitch about people taking their "hard earned money", while 10% of the country is unemployed and trying to make ends meet.
Most of all, it's incredibly short sighted. Having a bunch of poor angry people leads to higher crime, increased homelessness, riots, etc. You get enough of a base of poor and angry people and you get revolt and revolution (see almost every revolution and resistance movement in history).
What's that Lassie? You saying we should drop the cutoffs for Social Security even lower, Lassie? Maybe even get rid of Social Security altogether, Lassie?
No, I'm saying your point about rich people being able to take care of themselves and giving the finger to everyone else is fucking retarded, you arrogant prick. If you want to go live in a libertarian paradise, move to fucking Somalia. They won't bug you for Social Security taxes there. They won't make you pay for schools. The government won't do shit to you. You'll also be living in a hell hole in constant fear of the poor people around you who may or may not be desperate enough to stab you for the clothes on your back and the cash in your wallet. Have a good fucking time.
or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just
Given that the RIAA's favorite tactic was joining together hundreds of "Jon Does" into one case, couldn't an argument be made that those defendants are jointly liable, therefore each individually is only on the hook for a couple bucks?
The heart, you fool! It only works in the heart!
Consider this: lawyers spend years in college learning laws, then spend 8 hours a day (at least) immersed in the law. In the course of their life they'll spend probably half a million hours working with the law. Yet even they don't know enough about all areas of law to act as effective counsel for anything beyond their area of expertise (and usually it's even more limited to being the area of their expertise within their own state).
Understanding every facet of the law would be like being fluent in every programming language in existence from obscure assembly languages to pure brainfuck to every joke programming language. Except that US law is worse in that it's based on 250 some odd years of written law in the US, plus bases itself off "common law" which goes back hundreds of years back to England at least as far back as the Magna Carta, and could even be said to make some allusions to the Greek Democracy and Roman Republic of thousands of years ago. Oh, and the revision control is worse than CVS.
10 times what it would've cost to buy is a deterrent. 200 times what it would've cost to buy is absurd. 750 times what it cost to buy is Orwellian. 150000 times what it would've cost to buy is Lovecraftian.
Commercial interests can't drive national security issues
You aren't very familiar with US history are you?
Except in that case, if you wait a couple hours, you're the one making the big bang. Into the toilet.
You don't stay rich, if you ignore things that cause you to lose money. 4% is a lot of your income to permanently lose, especially, if government keeps increasing that.
I have so very little sympathy. A 39% tax rate on the top bracket is incredibly low. Even under Ronald Reagan the top tax rate was 50%, and all the conservatives love trotting that out as a time of great growth. Nevermind that in the 1950s, quite possibly one of the biggest economic booms in American history, the top tax rates were over 90%. There might not have been as many super rich, heck, there might not even have been as many "rich". But the average person wasn't financing everything they owned with endless debt, and the middle class was as strong as it's ever been.
Also, if Social Security is "retirement insurance" (which is the only relatively serious rationalization for Social Security), then it makes sense that rich people shouldn't have to pay it.
If you don't have kids, should you not have to pay for education? Or are there many hard to measure effects of a reasonable educated population? The taxes you pay don't necessarily have to come back to you as some form of direct personal benefit. Are we better or worse off having our elderly population be reasonably taken care of?
They already have self-insurance (in the form of wealth) that beats anything the government could provide.
You can make a lot less than $106000 and still save plenty of money for retirement (well, assuming a stock market crash doesn't wipe everything out).
It's sort of like Poe's Law, except for technological illiteracy instead of religious fundamentalism. There are way too many managers who will read it and think it's the best idea ever, he should add sarcasm tags before this becomes industry "best practices".
Well that's what you get when you hire a drunk Scotsman. I say hire the Aussie if you want a straight shooter who's always checking the horizon.
We have Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in Windows support.
A chick in IT? Surely you jest!
(kidding, kidding)
I think it's clear where this is going. The state will end up generating less revenue than expected due to this non-compliance. It will then either have to raise the tax or extend the filing requirement to more people to identify the people who are not complying.
Couldn't they just ask the IRS to rat on those people who report income above the cutoff but don't file in the state?
That reminds me a lot of how the rich are bitching about having to pay another 4% on their income taxes, despite not having to pay Social Security taxes on income over $106,800 (6.2% from you, 6.2% from the person paying you). That means that anyone in the 25% or 28% tax bracket is actually paying a higher rate of taxes than the top level. Do people not realize this? I'd be more than willing to keep the top marginal rate on income at 35% if the cap is removed on Social Security taxes.
Wild animals didn't move. We just removed the wild from where they were.